The Winter of Our Discontent Read online

  "Now, Father," said Mary, "don't go spoiling it for them."

  "I just wanted to separate the cereal from the mouse mask. They get all mixed up."

  "Pop, where would you say we could look it up?"

  "Look it up?"

  "Sure, like what some other guys said--"

  "Your great-grandfather had some pretty fine books. They're in the attic."

  "Like what?"

  "Oh, like Lincoln's speeches and Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. You might take a look at Thoreau or Walt Whitman or Emerson--Mark Twain too. They're all up there in the attic."

  "Did you read them, Pop?"

  "He was my grandfather. He used to read them to me sometimes."

  "Maybe you could help us with the essays."

  "Then they wouldn't be yours."

  "Okay," said Allen. "Will you remember to bring home some Peeks? They're full of iron and stuff."

  "I'll try."

  "Can we go to the movies?"

  Mary said, "I thought you were going to dye the Easter eggs. I'm boiling them now. You can take them out on the sun porch after dinner."

  "Can we go up in the attic and look at the books?"

  "If you turn out the light after. Once it burned for a week. You left it on, Ethan."

  When the children had gone, Mary said, "Aren't you glad they're in the contest?"

  "Sure, if they do it right."

  "I can't wait to tell you--Margie read me in cards today, three times, because she said she never saw anything like it. Three times! I saw the cards come up myself."

  "Oh! Lord!"

  "You won't be so suspicious when you hear. You always poke fun about tall dark strangers. You can't guess what it was about. Well--you want to guess?"

  He said, "Mary, I want to warn you."

  "Warn me? Why, you don't even know. My fortune is you."

  He spoke a harsh, bitter word under his breath.

  "What did you say?"

  "I said, 'Slim pickings.' "

  "That's what you think, but that's not what the cards think. Three times, she threw them."

  "Cards think?"

  "They know," said Mary. "Here she read my cards and it was all about you. You're going to be one of the most important men in this town--that's what I said, most important. And it's not going to be long either. It's very soon. Every card she turned showed money and more money. You're going to be a rich man."

  "Darling," he said, "please let me warn you, please!"

  "You're going to make an investment."

  "With what?"

  "Well, I was thinking about Brother's money."

  "No," he cried. "I wouldn't touch it. That's yours. And it's going to stay yours. Did you think that up or did--"

  "She never mentioned it. And the cards didn't. You are going to invest in July, and from then on, it's one thing after another-- one right after another. But don't it sound nice? That's the way she said it--'Your fortune is Ethan. He is going to be a very rich man, maybe the biggest man in this town.' "

  "Goddam her! She's got no right."

  "Ethan!"

  "Do you know what she's doing? Do you know what you're doing?"

  "I know I'm a good wife and she's a good friend. And I don't want to quarrel with the children hearing. Margie Young is the best friend I've got. I know you don't like her. What I think is you're jealous of my friends--that's what I think. I had a happy afternoon and you want to spoil it. That's not nice." Mary's face was mottled with angry disappointment, and vengeful toward this obstacle to her daydreaming.

  "You just sit there, Mr. Smart, and tear people down. You think Margie made it all up. She didn't, because I cut the cards three times--but even supposing she did, why would she do it except to be kind and friendly and offer a little help. You tell me that, Mr. Smart! You find some nasty reason."

  "I wish I knew," he said. "It might be pure mischief. She hasn't a man or a job. It might be mischief."

  Mary lowered her voice and spoke with scorn. "You talk about mischief--you wouldn't know mischief if it slapped you in the face. You don't know what Margie goes through. Why, there are men in this town after her all the time. Big men, married men, whispering and urging--nasty. Sometimes she don't know where to turn. That's why she needs me, a woman friend. Oh, she told me things--men you just wouldn't believe. Why, some of them even pretend they don't like her in public, and then they sneak to her house or call her up and try to get her to meet them--sanctimonious men, always preaching morals and then doing like that. You talk about mischief."

  "Did she say who they were?"

  "No, she didn't and that's another proof. Margie don't want to hurt anybody even if they hurt her. But she said there was one I just wouldn't believe. She said it would turn my hair gray if I knew."

  Ethan took a deep breath and held it and let it out as a huge sigh.

  "Wonder who it could be," Mary said. "The way she said it was like it was somebody we know well and just couldn't believe."

  "But she would tell under certain circumstances," Ethan said softly.

  "Only if she was forced. She said that herself. Only if she had to if like her--honor, or her good name, you know . . . Who do you s'pose it could be?"

  "I think I know."

  "You know? Who?"

  "Me."

  Her mouth fell open. "Oh! You fool," she said. "If I don't watch you, you trap me every time. Well it's better than gloomy."

  "A pretty kettle. Man confesses to sins of the flesh with wife's best friend. Is laughed to scorn."

  "That's not nice talk."

  "Perhaps man should have denied it. Then at least his wife would have honored him with suspicion. My darling, I swear to you by all that's holy, that never by word or deed have I ever made a pass at Margie Young-Hunt. Now will you believe I'm guilty?"

  "You!"

  "You don't think I'm good enough, desirable enough, in other words you don't think I could make the grade?"

  "I like jokes. You know it--but that's not something to joke about. I hope the children haven't got into the trunks up there. They never put anything back."

  "I'll try once more, fair wife. A certain woman, initials M. Y.-H., has surrounded me with traps, for reasons known only to herself. I am in grave danger of falling into one or more of them."

  "Why don't you think of your fortune? The cards said July and they said it three times--I saw it. You are going to get money and lots of money. Think about that."

  "Do you love money so much, cottontail?"

  "Love money? What do you mean?"

  "Do you want money enough so that even necromancy, thaumaturgy, juju, or any other dark practices are justified?"

  "You said it! You started it. I'm not going to let you hide in your words. Do I love money? No, I don't love money. But I don't love worry either. I'd like to be able to hold up my head in this town. I don't like the children to be hang-dog because they can't dress as good--as well--as some others. I'd love to hold up my head."

  "And money would prop up your head?"

  "It would wipe the sneers off the faces of your holy la-dedas."

  "No one sneers at Hawley."

  "That's what you think! You just don't see it."

  "Maybe because I don't look for it."

  "Are you throwing your holy Hawleys up at me?"

  "No, my darling. It's not much of a weapon any more."

  "Well, I'm glad you found it out. In this town or any other town a Hawley grocery clerk is still a grocery clerk."

  "Do you blame me for my failure?"

  "No. Of course I don't. But I do blame you for sitting wallowing in it. You could climb out of it if you didn't have your old-fashioned fancy-pants ideas. Everybody's laughing at you. A grand gentleman without money is a bum." The word exploded in her head, and she was silent and ashamed.

  "I'm sorry," Ethan said. "You have taught me something-- maybe three things, rabbit footling mine. Three things will never be believed--the true, the probable, and the logical. I know no
w where to get the money to start my fortune."

  "Where?"

  "I'll rob a bank."

  The little bell of the timer on the stove took up a slow-spaced pinging.

  Mary said, "Go call the children. The casserole's ready. Tell them to turn out the light." She listened to his tread.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My wife, my Mary, goes to her sleep the way you would close the door of a closet. So many times I have watched her with envy. Her lovely body squirms a moment as though she fitted herself into a cocoon. She sighs once and at the end of it her eyes close and her lips, untroubled, fall into that wise and remote smile of the ancient Greek gods. She smiles all night in her sleep, her breath purrs in her throat, not a snore, a kitten's purr. For a moment her temperature leaps up so that I can feel the glow of it beside me in the bed, then drops and she has gone away. I don't know where. She says she does not dream. She must, of course. That simply means her dreams do not trouble her, or trouble her so much that she forgets them before awakening. She loves to sleep and sleep welcomes her. I wish it were so with me. I fight off sleep, at the same time craving it.

  I have thought the difference might be that my Mary knows she will live forever, that she will step from the living into another life as easily as she slips from sleep to wakefulness. She knows this with her whole body, so completely that she does not think of it any more than she thinks to breathe. Thus she has time to sleep, time to rest, time to cease to exist for a little.

  On the other hand, I know in my bones and my tissue that I will one day, soon or late, stop living and so I fight against sleep, and beseech it, even try to trick it into coming. My moment of sleep is a great wrench, an agony. I know this because I have awakened at this second still feeling the crushing blow. And once in sleep, I have a very busy time. My dreams are the problems of the day stepped up to absurdity, a little like men dancing, wearing the horns and masks of animals.

  I sleep much less in time than Mary does. She says she needs a great deal of sleep and I agree that I need less but I am far from believing that. There is only so much energy stored in a body, augmented, of course, by foods. One can use it up quickly, the way some children gobble candy, or unwrap it slowly. There's always a little girl who saves part of her candy and so has it when the gobblers have long since finished. I think my Mary will live much longer than I. She will have saved some of her life for later. Come to think of it, most women live longer than men.

  Good Friday has always troubled me. Even as a child I was deep taken with sorrow, not at the agony of the crucifixion, but feeling the blighting loneliness of the Crucified. And I have never lost the sorrow, planted by Matthew, and read to me in the clipped, tight speech of my New England Great-Aunt Deborah.

  Perhaps it was worse this year. We do take the story to ourselves and identify with it. Today Marullo instructed me, so that for the first time I understood it, in the nature of business. Right afterward I was offered my first bribe. That's an odd thing to say at my age, but I don't remember any other. I must think about Margie Young-Hunt. Is she an evil thing? What is her purpose? I know she has promised me something and threatened me if I don't accept it. Can a man think out his life, or must he just tag along?

  So many nights I have lain awake, hearing my Mary's little purring beside me. If you stare into darkness, red spots start swimming on your eyes, and the time is long. Mary so loves her sleep that I have tried to protect her in it, even when the electric itch burned on my skin. She wakens if I leave the bed. It worries her. Because her only experience with sleeplessness has been in illness, she thinks I am not well.

  This night I had to get up and out. Her breath purred gently and I could see the archaic smile on her mouth. Maybe she dreamed of good fortune, of the money I was about to make. Mary wants to be proud.

  It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering.It's a safety place--everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it. Secret, quiet movement often awakens a sleeper when a deliberate normal action does not. Also I am convinced that sleeping minds wander into the thoughts of other people. I caused myself to need the bathroom, and when it was so, got up and went. And afterward I went quietly downstairs, carrying my clothes, and dressed in the kitchen.

  Mary says I share other people's troubles that don't exist. Maybe that is so, but I did see a little possible scene play out in the dim-lighted kitchen--Mary awakening and searching the house for me, and her face troubled. I wrote a note on the grocery pad, saying, "Darling--I'm restless. Have gone for a walk. Be back soon." I think I left it squarely in the center of the kitchen table so that if the light was turned on at the wall switch it would be the first thing seen.

  Then I eased the back door open and tasted the air. It was chilly, smelled of a crusting of white frost. I muffled up in a heavy coat and pulled a knitted sailor's cap down over my ears. The electric kitchen clock growled. It said quarter of three. I had been lying watching the red spots in the dark since eleven.

  Our town of New Baytown is a handsome town, an old town, one of the first clear and defined whole towns in America. Its first settlers and my ancestors, I believe, were sons of those restless, treacherous, quarrelsome, avaricious seafaring men who were a headache to Europe under Elizabeth, took the West Indies for their own under Cromwell, and came finally to roost on the northern coast, holding charters from the returned Charles Stuart. They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unalike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property. Where they merged, they produced a hard-bitten, surviving bunch of monkeys. I know about them because my father made me know. He was a kind of high amateur ancestor man and I've always noticed that ancestor people usually lack the qualities of the ones they celebrate. My father was a gentle, well-informed, ill-advised, sometimes brilliant fool. Singlehanded he lost the land, money, prestige, and future; in fact he lost nearly everything Allens and Hawleys had accumulated over several hundred years, lost everything but the names--which was all my father was interested in anyway. Father used to give me what he called "heritage lessons." That's why I know so much about the old boys. Maybe that's also why I'm a clerk in a Sicilian grocery on a block Hawleys used to own. I wish I didn't resent it so much. It wasn't depression or hard times that wiped us out.

  All that came from starting to say New Baytown is a pretty town. I turned right on Elm Street instead of left and walked fast up to Porlock, which is a cockeyed parallel with High. Wee Willie, our fat constable, would be dozing in his police car on the High, and I didn't want to pass the time of night with him. "What you doing up so late, Eth? Got yourself a little piece of something?" Wee Willie gets lonesome and loves to talk, and then later he talks about what he talked about. Quite a few small but nasty scandals have grown out of Willie's loneliness. The day constable is Stonewall Jackson Smith. That's not a nickname. He was christened Stonewall Jackson, and it does set him apart from all the other Smiths. I don't know why town cops have to be opposites but they usually are. Stoney Smith is a man who wouldn't give away what day it is unless he were on the stand under oath. Chief Smith runs the police work of the town and he's dedicated, studies the latest methods, and has taken the F.B.I. training in Washington. I guess he's as good a policeman as you are likely to find, tall and quiet and with eyes like little gleams of metal. If you were going in for crime, the chief would be a man to avoid.

  All this came from my going over to Porlock Street to avoid talking to Wee Willie. It's on Porlock that the beautiful houses of New Baytown are. You see in the early eighteen hundreds we had over a hundred whaling bottoms. When the ships came back from a year or two out as far as the Antarctic or the China Sea, they would be loaded with oil and very rich. But they would have touched at foreign ports and picked up things as well as ideas. That's why you see so ma
ny Chinese things in the houses on Porlock Street. Some of those old captain-owners had good taste too. With all their money, they brought in English architects to build their houses. That's why you see so much Adam influence and Greek revival architecture on Porlock Street. It was that period in England. But with all the fanlights and fluted columns and Greek keys, they never neglected to put a widow's walk on the roof. The idea was that the faithful home-bound wives could go up there to watch for returning ships, and maybe some of them did. My family, the Hawleys, and the Phillipses and the Elgars and the Bakers were older. They stayed put on Elm Street and their houses were what is called Early American, peak roofs and shiplap siding. That's the way my house, the old Hawley house, is. And the giant elms are as old as the houses.

  Porlock Street has kept its gas street lamps, only there are electric globes in them now. In the summer tourists come to see the architecture and what they call "the old-world charm" of our town. Why does charm have to be old-world?

  I forget how the Vermont Allens got mixed up with the Hawleys. It happened pretty soon after the Revolution. I could find out, of course. Up in the attic somewhere there will be a record. By the time father died, my Mary was pretty tired of Hawley family history, so when she suggested that we store all the things in the attic, I understood how she felt. You can get pretty tired of other people's family history. Mary isn't even New Baytown born. She came from a family of Irish extraction but not Catholic. She always makes a point of that. Ulster family, she calls them. She came from Boston.

  No she didn't, either. I got her in Boston. I can see both of us, maybe more clearly now than then, a nervous, frightened Second Lieutenant Hawley with a weekend pass, and the soft, petal-cheeked, sweet-smelling darling of a girl, and triply all of those because of war and textbooks. How serious we were, how deadly serious. I was going to be killed and she was prepared to devote her life to my heroic memory. It was one of a million identical dreams of a million olive uniforms and cotton prints. And it might well have ended with the traditional Dear John letter except that she devoted her life to her warrior. Her letters, sweet with steadfastness, followed me everywhere, round, clear handwriting in dark blue ink on light blue paper, so that my whole company recognized her letters and every man was curiously glad for me. Even if I hadn't wanted to marry Mary, her constancy would have forced me to for the perpetuation of the world dream of fair and faithful women.